Tuesday

Dec 11, 2018 at 11:30 AMDec 12, 2018 at 8:17 AM

When former Selectman Kathy Sachs of Georgetown headed into work one morning in late November, she found herself in a worrisome position – upside down, hanging by a seatbelt in her flipped car on the side of I-95 – and she would come to realize that the seatbelt is the reason she lived to talk about it.

"I think, without my seatbelt, I could be dead, or worse yet, I could be paralyzed from the neck down," Sachs said.

The morning of Nov. 27 started out like any other. Sachs, a receptionist at a Boston Children’s Hospital clinic in Peabody, got into her car and headed down 95 about a half hour before her husband Bob would head down that same highway to his job.

But as she reached Danvers at about 6 a.m., things took an alarming turn. Her vehicle, a Hundai Accent, hydroplaned.

A 20-minute nightmare

"So the water grabbed my tire and pulled my car to the right. And my guess is I overcorrected to the left or stepped on my brakes, and it turns out you’re not supposed to step on your brakes when you're hydroplaning, but I did not know that," Sachs said. "So I slid across three lanes of 95 in morning traffic without hitting anybody else."

As Sachs, 67, hit the grass on the side of the interstate, her car went airborne, flipped over and came straight down onto the headlights and then landed upside-down.

"Like a turtle, just hanging there," she recalled. "I remember the whole thing. I remember hitting, and I remember bouncing. I don’t think I realized I was upside-down, but I could see in my mirror and I realized I was way below the level of the highway. And the only moment I had to be scared was the moment when I thought, ‘No one’s going to see me down here.’"

Sachs put her hazard lights on and began honking her horn ferociously to get anyone’s attention. Eventually her car’s engine died. But luckily for her, someone had seen her car flip off the roadway – a Massachusetts state trooper – and her panic was met with blue lights in the distance.

"And shortly after that, I saw a flashlight coming down," Sachs said. "It was an off-duty state trooper behind me who was on his way to work at Logan Airport, and he saw the whole thing happen. He’s the one who told me I went airborne. I wasn’t actually aware of that."

The trooper introduced himself as Al, and "Trooper Al" called for firefighters and EMTs and stayed with Sachs in the meantime. The car was in a puddle of water because it had been raining so much. He couldn’t get the doors open, but Sachs was able to reach the locks and unlock them.

"I was suspended in mid-air by my seatbelt, hanging over my steering wheel," she said.

A good sign was that there wasn’t any blood visible or any broken glass inside the car. The sunroof and side mirrors didn’t break.

"So he said, ‘Okay, the problem is we need to get you out of here. But the only way to get you out is for you to press the button and release the seatbelt, and then you’re going to fall onto the windshield," Sachs continued. "So then he said, ‘Do you want to do that now, or wait until the other people come?’"

The trooper went away for a moment and then returned with what Sachs describes as a sense of urgency to get her out of the car. He didn’t tell her why, and Sachs says it’s good that he didn’t tell her whatever the reason was.

"I’ve never been through anything like this before," she said. "I’ve never been in this serious an accident, I’ve never been in an upside-down car, so I don’t really have any answers, right? I don’t have any ideas."

But just as they were about to release the seatbelt, Sachs saw yellow legs and black boots and knew the firefighters were there. They held her on one side as she unbuckled the belt, making for a safer landing. Sachs did bump her head, but not enough to cause a concussion. The firefighters then brought her up the embankment to wait for the EMTs.

At that point, "Trooper Al" brought Sachs aside and made her promise to go to a hospital and not refuse medical treatment. Many people in car accidents are so pumped up with adrenaline that they may feel fine when in fact there are injuries that won’t make themselves known for a while afterwards.

"I understand now why people refuse medical attention, because I felt so good compared to my car. At that point we knew I had walked up the hill, nothing appeared to be broken, I wasn’t bleeding, so I’m standing there looking down at my car and I feel great."

Sachs heeded the trooper’s advice, though, and went with EMTs to Beverly Hospital to be evaluated and treated. She wound up with some minor injuries and some aches and pains, but nothing life-altering.

While standing on that hill, however, all she could think about was her husband.

"So I kept saying to them, ‘I lost my phone, you have to call my husband,’ because my husband works in Danvers and I knew he was going to be driving down the highway behind me.’"

The trooper, unable to find her phone, let her use his phone to call her husband, Bob, and let him know she was in an accident and was headed to a hospital.

Chaos tends to strike quickly. The total time between when her car hydroplaned and when she was taken to the hospital was just 20 minutes.

In what was another small miracle of the morning, a firefighter later found her phone in a puddle, and it was still working. At Beverly Hospital, Sachs called her coworkers and let them know what had happened.

Buckle up

Sachs says without her seatbelt, she likely would not have walked away from that accident. She would have been tossed around the vehicle and fallen on her head or neck when it flipped upside-down. Internal injuries, a fractured skull or a broken neck could have given this story a tragic ending.

"If it hurt to fall forward and clunk my head on the windshield when I was wearing my seatbelt, what happens during all that bobbing-around time?" Sachs said.

Her airbags never deployed, either, since the car never hit anything head-on.

"The whole story is a series of miracles," Sachs said. "And people said to me afterwards, ‘How do you feel?’ And I always just say ‘Grateful.’"

With her Hundai Accent wrecked, Sachs opted to get something a bit sturdier, a Subaru, which is what she’d had before. The Accent got great mileage, because it was made of a lot of plastic.

"The Subaru salesman said to me, ‘If you’d been driving a Subaru, you wouldn’t have hydroplaned.’"

Sachs was hoping to find "Trooper Al" to thank him and let him know she’s okay. And this Tuesday evening, she got her wish. Trooper Al Manzi's boss at Logan Airport called her and told her he was putting Manzi up for a commendation for his actions that day.